The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  “When did you learn to breathe like that?”

  “You taught me. Remember? A long time ago when you were becoming who you are today, a fine man and a good cop.” Grace manages a small curve of her lips. “I’m sorry. I don’t go back there very often and neither should you. Go find Marge. Tell her what her son needs.”

  * * *

  “You’ve reached the Grahams.” Matt recognizes Marge’s recorded voice and takes a moment before he leaves his message. He doesn’t want to seem demanding or pathetic. The subject is Collin’s welfare, not his own discomfort at talking to this woman for the first time in ten years. “Hello, Marge. This is Matt. I’m calling to ask your help. Give me a call when you are able to talk.”

  He sounded okay, he thinks. Businesslike. He isn’t quite ready when the phone rings five minutes later and it is Marge. “Thanks for calling back. I appreciate it.” Way too formal. “I’m having a problem” No, not I. “Actually, Collin is having a problem right now, and the solution…”

  “Problem?”

  “He’s being bullied—you know, the way kids do when someone’s different. But he’s done really well up to now—good grades, he’s…” Matt wants to say almost normal, but instead he says, “he’s been doing okay in school, once the therapy took hold. Actually, he’s a pretty good kid, Marge. I’m proud of him.”

  A silence follows his last words. Then, “What do you need from me?” He remembers the voice, but her words have unfamiliar sharp edges that make Matt wince.

  She’s still empty of love, despite what Grace says about mothers. He tries again. “Not me—Collin. He needs to finish out high school at McKinley Academy, an alternative school for kids like him who march by a different drummer. He doesn’t deserve to be miserable when who he is…” Matt can’t come up with a word. Not special. Not wounded. Not strange. “Who he is, himself, is a good kid. A kid I love.”

  Again, silence. Then, “How much?”

  Besides love for her son, she’s empty of everything that Matt fell in love with years ago. Her clipped sentences, her impatience to get to the end of this conversation reveal a stranger, one with a rich husband, two stepchildren who visit once a month, and, according to his sources, a slew of real estate deals in the best part of the city.

  Doesn’t matter. “I can come up with ten thousand a year. The tuition is twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “For about two years, right?” She seems to be making a note; paper rattles at the other end of the line. “I’m glad to hear things are going well for Collin. And, I hope, for you. Let me know where to send the check.”

  Matt has to ask. “Why haven’t you called him?”

  Matt can hear the inhalation on the other end of the line. Exhalation. She breathes, too. “I failed, Matt. I can’t stand facing the child I failed.” The line goes dead.

  Perhaps Grace is right. Once a mother, always a mother, even one who believes she’s failed. Especially, maybe, a mother who believes she’s failed.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sarah

  September 2009

  When the noises stop scraping out of my aching throat, Ellie lifts the quilt from my face, and she leans close to me and whispers, “Don’t say a word…about anything.”

  She doesn’t have to tell me that. The minute I saw Rick’s hand, I understood that someone I knew had done that to him, maybe Mouse or Leaky or, I couldn’t stand to think of it, maybe Jimmy, sweet Jimmy, who’s never done anything bad in his life to anyone else.

  “Let the cops solve this one. We need to stay out of it.” Then she picks up the photo from the table and turns it toward me. “See this? My son. Ten years ago he did something bad, maybe like one of your forest buddies last night. He was a wild kid, into drugs, like I told you, but not into much trouble, but this time him and a friend decided to mug someone to get money to pay their dealer. The guy they robbed dropped dead of a heart attack an hour after they shoved a knife at his chest. I read about it in the newspaper the next day.

  “The victim couldn’t describe his attackers, except that they were white and young, but he said the weapon was an ivory-handled hunting knife. When I read about the knife, I went into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and I knew. The only thing Danny’s father had forgotten when he snuck out was his Primus hunting knife. I had kept it for twenty years—used to touch it once in a while to remind myself how young and stupid I’d been. It was gone.”

  Ellie puts down the picture, shakes her head. The way the hurt is riding across her eyes, tightening her mouth, I wonder if she’s ever told this story before.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I figured that it wasn’t murder; the guy had a bad heart. My son had to learn a lesson before he really got into trouble. I’d never forgive myself if that happened because I didn’t stop him right then. I called the police. But Danny’d seen the paper, too, and had gotten high on something to give himself courage or to forget maybe. When I hung up the phone, he charged out of his bedroom and came at me, knocked me down, kicked the shit out of me. He said he hated me. I said he wasn’t my son anymore.”

  Ellie’s fingers rub hard on her eyelids, holding back, maybe trying to find tears. “I haven’t seen him since.” When she looks at me again, her eyes are red, dry.

  “Not your fault, Ellie,” I say.

  “He’d still be here—or somewhere—if I hadn’t called.”

  “But you’d know. And like you said, if something bad happened after that, you’d never forget you could have maybe stopped it.”

  I know about never forgetting, about nightmares, about wondering what I could have done to make things different for my mother, and for me. My bad dreams are fading a little, but there is a wad of guilt stuck right under my heart that will never go away. Why should it? I’m about to tell her about it, to maybe let her know I understand, when she sits up, straight-lipped, folds the quilt into the neat square she uses to lean against when she relaxes on the davenport.

  “Some things need to get forgotten.” She pats the quilt smooth and sets it down. “All this commotion will be over before you know it.” The look she gives me says the conversation is over. She stands up and heads for the bathroom.

  But it isn’t, really. Not in my head. I keep thinking about the two people, people I knew, good people, who are dead. One might be the father of my maybe-baby. The other was a soft-spoken stranger who helped a vomiting girl like a friend would. I could tell the sergeant what I know or suspect about Rick, his missing finger, what I heard in the camp, but if I do, I’ll get my friends into bad trouble. Who’d believe them, dirty runaways, beggars, druggies probably, kids who don’t appreciate what they would have if they’d just straighten up. Why wouldn’t people believe they were also capable of murder? And maybe they are, I realize, if they’re afraid enough.

  The only real family I’ve had for a long time is Leaky and Jimmy and Peter and Lila and Mouse. I cannot hurt them.

  And when he left this afternoon, Sergeant Trommald said the police would be searching the park for evidence, maybe the forest trails if they needed to.

  I can imagine it. One night the scraggy bushes around the campfire will burst with uniforms, guns maybe, Leaky crying, Lila saying, “Fuck.” I can’t think what Starkey will do. Smile, maybe, ask the cops to join them for dinner like a good father would do. He won’t crack; one of the kids will. Then, who knows? Whatever comes next will have to be terrible.

  The only thing I can do is sneak back to the camp, warn my friends, help them get away. I don’t care what happens to Starkey. Maybe I can even make it happen to him if my family is safe.

  So when Ellie comes back out of the bathroom, crosses her arms in front of her, and says I need to leave, that she can’t deal with trouble when it gets too close, I tell her I understand. I tell her I’ll go to Transitions, the teen center on Ninth Street, find out if at sixteen I am still eligible for foster care. I can take care of myself, I say.

  “Good. That’s my motto, too. Make sure
you get to the medical bus,” she adds, looking at my stomach. “You need to know pretty soon.”

  I don’t tell her I already went and that I don’t have the courage to use the pregnancy kit they gave me. I don’t want to know. Yet. I thank her for her help, pack up the clothes she’s lent me, slip into her old red sneakers, and, without knowing I’d do it, I kiss her cheek. Her hand goes up to where my lips have landed, and she says, “Good luck.” Her mouth twitches a little like she might tear up, but since Ellie never cries, she turns her head and looks at the door. I open it, say good-bye to the dull brown apartment and the good gray lady who lives there.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Matt

  September 2009

  “This looks bad,” Shelly says as she hands Matt a note. “Same neighborhood as the boy under the leaves. Peter, right?”

  Matt takes the paper, sees the address. Yes, a block south of the oak-lined street. Yesterday they learned Peter Stafford’s name after a worried mother filed a missing person’s report when her son stopped making his weekly calls to let her know he was okay. Mrs. Stafford said her son had taken off to see how the rest of the world lived before he started college. Judging by the scars on his back and violated body, he had.

  “Dead man in the lobby. Beaten, it looks like. They need to identify him. Guess he’s pretty badly messed up.”

  * * *

  “What did I tell you? Murder. Right here at our home. Get some protection in here. This is no way to live.”

  The same old guy is yelling at him from the front door of the apartment house. “I seen you before, Mr. Policeman. What are you going to do about this?”

  Matt pushes through the people circled around the officer and sees a body, twisted into a bizarre crawling pose, his face a mash of flesh and blood. A trail of blood from the front door indicates that the victim dragged himself into the building.

  “Does this man live here?” he asks, realizing too late that the answer will be “Not anymore.”

  “Did he?” he corrects himself.

  “Hard to tell,” someone answers.

  “Looks like Rick’s coat,” another voice offers.

  Matt reaches into the overcoat’s pockets, feels papers, pulls them out. Candy wrappers. And a pink receipt of some kind. The letterhead indicates it came from the Williams Medical Clinic. He can’t read the date, but among the blurred carbon words he learns that a girl was treated for flu symptoms and released without their consent. The notation was written in full caps. Perhaps that’s how the van avoided liability claims when clients wandered off after being given a pill or a toothbrush.

  “Anyone know a girl who lives here, maybe with Rick?”

  The dubious looks he gets let him know that the idea of Rick with a young girl is hard to think about. “Rick was…” a woman in the front row says, “kind of raw.”

  “And crazy,” another adds.

  “The woman in 306 has a teenage girl staying with her. I seen them in the elevator.” The old man again. This time he might actually be helpful.

  “306?”

  “Yeah, I kind of know her. Had me to dinner one time. Ellie, I think.”

  Matt leaves the officer to stand over the bloody pile of man and wait for the examiner and climbs the stairs to the third floor. The door of 306 opens after he knocks twice. He almost knows this woman. He remembers her eyes, startling blue, even now, although she must be close to seventy. Then he remembers the son, the mother smelling of alcohol, holding her ribs, lying. Not this building, though. Another 1980s project just like it a few blocks away.

  “Sergeant Trommald,” he says.

  The woman lets him in; the girl he’s looking for steps out of the kitchen. He jots down the woman’s name. Mrs. Ellie Miller. She introduces Sarah, and the three of them go down to the stairwell in the lobby where a moist carpet of blood has spread under the body.

  “It’s Rick,” Sarah says, her voice choked into a shudder. Mrs. Miller nods. They both turn away, and Matt stops them as they ring for the elevator.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s wearing the earring I gave him, and his finger…” Matt sees the woman’s hand tighten on Sarah’s arm, and she doesn’t continue.

  “His finger?”

  The words dissolve into a low moan. “Why did they do that to him?” She wipes her eyes. “Can we go? I can’t stand this.”

  Matt sees what she is seeing. A finger has been severed from Rick’s right hand.

  “We’ve done what you wanted.” Mrs. Miller, her grip still on the girl’s arm, turns them both as the elevator doors open. “Good-bye, Sergeant Trouble.”

  As they disappear into the elevator, Matt asks the superintendent to unlock the door of the small, windowless room this Rick lived in.

  “Place is illegal,” the super says, switching on a light. “But I felt sorry for the guy. He was sweet, you know. Always a smile under that beard, unless he wasn’t feeling good. Which didn’t happen so often, only maybe once every three months. Not like some of the sickos around here, permanently crazy, don’t take their meds. One guy started camping under a tree in our back yard, what we call a yard, mostly Dumpsters, and scared the living daylight out of the garbage guys, claiming he had a machete, he’d kill them. Took three phone calls to you guys to get him out of here.”

  The super’s guilt about the room has him trying to divert attention. “That so?” Matt says, looking at the sad life in front of him. A cot, a two-burner stove, a couple of bowls and a plate, neatly stacked on a table over which a calendar marked with X’s hangs. A photo of a young woman, graduation, big hair from the ‘70’s, is propped next to a lamp on a chest. Matt opens the drawers and finds some T- shirts and underwear in one, and in the other, scissors, a harmonica, a couple of well-read books, and a notebook, empty except for the addresses and phone numbers of three people.

  He copies the telephone numbers and leaves the notebook for the forensics crew who will be coming in after the medical examiner.

  “Toilet’s down the hall,” he’s told when he opens the one door in the room and finds only a couple of jackets inside.

  “What do I do with all this stuff?” The super is whining.

  “I’ll make some calls. Maybe one of these contacts will want to look it over.”

  “Yeah, but…” Matt guesses that the man is worried. The quicker the better to get rid of the evidence of illegal rental. He’s probably pocketed the rent without reporting it to the city, which owns the building.

  “After the crew leaves, just bag it all. I’ll let you know if someone wants it.”

  Back at his desk, Matt tries the phone numbers. The first number, California, is disconnected.

  The second is answered quickly. “Williams Mobile Clinic, Jesse speaking.” When Jesse learns that Rick is dead, she makes a little cry and says, “Not Rick! He was doing so well. He visited us just yesterday.”

  Matt tells her a few details and asks if Rick hung out with anyone she knew, someone who might have been with him yesterday.

  “Everyone knows Rick,” she answers. “He brings street people who need us to the van, and spends time talking with folks about their problems. Sometimes he plays his harmonica in the park, to take in a little cash, but mostly, he says, to give a little pleasure to others.”

  “Drink?

  “He says he allows himself one beer a day…sorry, allowed. I can’t believe this. That anyone would hurt this man.”

  A woman answers the third call, a long-distance number on the eastern side of the state. Laura Boyce, Rick’s sister. “I’ve been looking for him for a long time.” Rick left her home several years before after a terrible schizophrenic event, violent, frightening. She told him he should come back to her when he got back on his medication. He never returned. “I’ve been expecting a phone call like this. He was a good brother, really, but I couldn’t have him screaming and crazy with my kids here.” Her voice cracks and she clears her throat. “How did he die? Did you have to shoot him
?”

  Matt is not surprised by her question. The local papers have described in detail several police shootings of mentally ill men during the past summer. The supposed incompetence of policemen is good copy during the slow, warm months. Their competence rarely makes the front pages.

  “No, Mrs. Boyce. Rick was murdered. But I do know from several of his friends—” He thinks of Jesse and the old woman and the crying girl. “—that Rick was well-liked and has been living a stable life. We don’t know what happened.”

  He has his suspicions, of course. Crazy is the word that some people use when they describe Rick. Someone else is crazy, too—really crazy. The boy, Peter, was beaten, stabbed, left out on the street. Rick was beaten, and judging by the amount of blood, probably stabbed, his heart and a stub of a finger sending out a red stream until he died in the lobby of the apartment house. Someone with a knife may be out there right now, walking the neighborhood, sitting on the bench in the park, waiting for more instructions from his personal demon.

  Forensics can verify that hunch. Knives leave prints, as do objects used to beat in someone’s brains.

  Matt glances at his watch. He’s missed it, Collin’s graduation from McKinley Academy. Grace and Ben are at the school, and this evening they will bring his son home to Matt’s apartment, and they will celebrate not only his graduation but his acceptance to a college located in town, one that specializes in computer technology.